Students participating in a landscape installation event. Photo courtesy of studentcareerdays.org

Colorado State University will host this year’s PLANET Student Career Days, a national event geared toward recruiting college students into critical positions in the growing landscaping industry.

More than 850 students from around the country will compete in the three-day event, which allows them to demonstrate and hone real-world skills. The 38th annual event, hosted by the Professional Landcare Network, or PLANET, gives students the opportunity to showcase their talents in areas such as tree climbing, patio building and wood construction.

More than 70 companies will be recruiting at the event, which takes place March 20-23.

Roger Phelps the promotional communications manager for STIHL Inc., a Virginia-based manufacturer and distributor of handheld outdoor power equipment, said everyone benefits from investing in the future.

“We supply tools for industry professionals to do what they need to do,” Phelps, whose company sponsors the event, said. “If we don’t support the industry, that impacts us financially. Beyond that, we enjoy lawns and parks too. This is the largest event that actually celebrates, focuses on and challenges the young people who are interested in lawn care, landscaping and horticulture.”

Denver Public Schools announced today it will expand its Denver Math Fellows Program to reach thousands more students with focused math tutoring in 2013-14.

The city-wide expansion of the program was made possible this November when taxpayers approved a mill levy to increase funding for Denver schools. The new funds will cover the cost of training, development, and support for new Fellows including an annual salary, benefits, and potential bonuses for meeting rigorous student attendance and performance benchmarks.

The program was initially born out of a partnership that began in 2010 with Blueprint Schools Network, the national non-profit organization that partnered with the district in managing turnaround efforts to close achievement gaps in Far Northeast Denver.

In the 2011-12 school year students in seven Far Northeast schools participated in a pilot program which included 45 minutes of small group tutoring during the school day in addition to their regular math class. Students who were part of the in the program were shown to advance up to three grade levels in math over the course of the year.

Based on the success of the pilot, DPS will expand the program to hire over 275 new, full-time math fellows to tutor students in the 4th, 6th, 8th and 9th grades in 46 schools district wide.

With the hallways mostly empty earlier this week, several students from Boulder’s Fairview High School livened up the atmosphere by channeling the undead in a video shoot that will become one element of a campaign to help students confront a variety of issues.

The production, headed by University of Colorado Boulder adjunct instructor Richard Goode-Allen, featured students made up by professional make-up artists playing zombies wearing signs representing different “zombie emotions” — like envy, fear, stress and imperfection — that follow the video’s heroine through the halls. Ultimately, she’s thrown a lifeline and escapes their grip.

The project promotes the school’s “Awareness Drive” that addresses many aspects of students’ mental health and wellness, including substance abuse, cutting, depression and eating disorders. The resource fair takes place March 18-22 at Fairview and serves as a pilot for future projects both within and outside the Boulder Valley School District.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush told an audience of 1,700 Denver business and civic leaders on Tuesday that a failing educational system puts the United States at risk of becoming a nation in decline.

Speaking at the spring luncheon of ACE Scholarships at the Hyatt Convention Center, Bush said the path to fixing the systems is more parental engagement, higher educational standards, better accountability, customized learning, reform of the teaching profession and empowering people with school choice.

“In schooling, the most important thing we ought to be doing is providing choice,” he said.

ACE Scholarships is a Denver-based nonprofit started in 2000 that provides partial scholarships to low-income students in Colorado and Montana in grades kindergarten to 12 so they can attend the school of their choice. ACE is funded through contributions from private citizens, corporations and foundations. Since 2000, it has provided more than 9,000 scholarships worth more than $17.8 million.

To the beat of drums, more than 300 eighth-graders marched into Thornton’s Lake Village Park Thursday morning clad in full Civil War battle regalia — while joggers, strollers and passers-by marveled at what has become an annual spectacle.

The students from Century Middle School in the Adams 12 school district spent the next several hours playing well-researched roles in the battle of Shiloh, decked out in authentic uniforms and carrying replica weapons. Adults directed them and shot video to be compiled into a documentary on the historic clash.

Instructor Elizabeth Hirsh, left, helps students process the fake "grave" where remains of a fictional murder victim were found.

It started with the disappearance of a young woman and her abusive boyfriend. Blood stains and a bullet casing added to the storyline.

Gradually, the plot evolved into a highly collaborative, interdisciplinary academic exercise at the Community College of Aurora. Coordinated by Elizabeth Hirsh, who heads the anthropology department, the project was chronicled in the March 25 edition of The Denver Post. But that was before the evidence pointing to the death of imaginary victim Sarah Hopewell had been analyzed, before a suspect had been charged with her murder and brought to trial.

Last Saturday, Hopewell’s boyfriend faced the prosecution before a judge — Leroy A. Simmons, the retired judge who famously presided over the Erin Brockovich case (and played himself in the movie) — and a jury. In a three-hour mock trial facilitated by members of CCA’s drama club playing characters from the story, the defendant was found not guilty of murder, but guilty of several lesser crimes such as tampering with evidence and abuse of a corpse.

While tutoring one of her special education students who struggled with multiplication facts, Peiffer Elementary School teacher Karen Allen saw a way to use kids’ affinity for sequences to put them on a course toward mastery of basic math.

Just as students could rely on the “A-B-C Song” to help them recognize a random letter, they could employ a “sequence strategy” to help them grasp multiplication, she observed. So she literally put that idea into motion and crafted a series of physical activities which, combined with simple chants and songs, helped kids learn to count by twos, fours, sixes — all the way up to 12s.

Students can then apply that sequencing strategy to solve multiplication problems, while having fun and getting some exercise in the process.

And that, she says, was “the glue that made it stick.”

She applied the method to students she was tutoring, then to her special ed students and now to a variety of kids in grades 3 through 6 throughout the Jeffco school. Over months of research and trial and error, she tweaked the process and made it adaptable to all sorts of situations. One of her co-workers even did a master’s thesis on the program.

She has compiled everything into a book, “Movin’ Through Multiplication,” that she plans to publish this summer.

The Denver Post is launching an occasional series of blog posts on interesting and innovative ideas and techniques that teachers use to enhance curriculum. The basic format will include a brief description of the idea coupled with a short video to illustrate the concepts more clearly.

Teachers, administrators, students, parents — anyone can nominate a teacher who has found interesting and innovative ways to approach an academic subject. Our objective is to share these ideas with the community and give teachers another resource for ways to effectively deliver curriculum.

Colorado Classroom provides ground-level reporting on what’s going on in the state’s public schools and on college campuses, looking at people, places, issues, trends and innovative approaches to education.